by Elmer Kelton
Dedecker’s slack jaw dropped. His bleary eyes counted sixteen men—maybe seventeen. Every man carried a rifle as well as a belt gun. He caught the grim visage of the gray-haired man who rode in the lead. Suddenly Turk Dedecker’s heart began to pound. His nervous tongue flicked cross dry lips, and he knew he needed a drink. He stumbled into his shack and slammed its door behind him. For some reason then, he picked up the heavy cedar bar and dropped it into place. His trembling hands groped under his bunk until they closed upon a bottle. He sat down wearily and drank from it, and wondered dazedly what had gone wrong.
An hour behind the first outfit came the string of riders from the Lazy E. Most of the hands had been sent out the night before to carry Scott Tillman’s message to ranches all over the high country. But still there were an even dozen, counting the regulars and McKinney’s punchers. And on the way they were joined by Dodd Jernigan’s men from the Long J, and the brush-popping cowboys from the T Anchor down in the breaks, and old Charlie Merchant and his sons from their little valley spread.
Scott Tillman rode stiffly, a sharp pain jabbing him with each jolting step his horse took. But it wasn’t as bad as yesterday, and there was little of the agony in it that he had gritted his way through on that awful ride from Nell Owen’s ranch to Curly Kirkendall’s. He would make it now, he knew. In grim satisfaction he looked back over his shoulder and recounted the men. There were little men and big men in the group, men who until recent days had known only distrust of each other. Now they rode together.
Beside Scott a slender girl rode sidesaddle, her eyes returning to him again and again in worry. He had tried to make Nell Owen stay at the Lazy D, but she had stoutly insisted that she was a ranch owner and had as much right to go as anyone. So he finally let her come along, and he smiled with a touch of pride.
A mile from town the fanned-out riders topped over a rise and rode headlong into another party. A chuckwagon lumbered along behind it, two spans of mules straining in harness to keep up with the cowboys who rode ahead.
Tol Hervey angled over as the big groups merged into one. He raised a brown hand and showed stained teeth in a broad, mustache-framed grin. “Tickled to see you, Scott. With you back, we’ll give them hell.”
At just past ten-thirty they spanned out down the riverbank and splashed across toward the ragged scattering of picket shacks and adobes that was High Land. Scattered in an uneven circle about the town, riders from other outfits waited impatiently.
A smile broke across Scott Tillman’s face. It wasn’t a smile of humor, but rather one of satisfaction. There were fifty men here, maybe sixty.
That they had stirred up even the latest sleeping of High Land’s denizens he had no doubt. He could see heads raised cautiously above the swinging doors of the Paradise Bar, and the side curtains pulled aslant behind the windows of Wild Mary Donovan’s place down the street. At the adobe Plains Hotel a man stepped out the back door and looked apprehensively at the stable behind, as if wondering whether he ought to try to make it to his horse. Then, making up his mind, he trotted back into the building.
The whole thing had been Scott’s idea. Now he could feel the eyes of all the men resting upon him, appraising him. Nervousness was tugging at him. And weariness was beginning to tell, too, for the price of his wound was still a heavy one.
Raising his left hand, Scott pointed toward the largest building in town, a long T-shaped adobe which the High Land men had erected in smug triumph after their furtive theft of the county seat.
“We’ll meet at the courthouse.” He spoke as loudly as he could.
At the door he swung down joltingly, the weakness bearing heavily on his shoulders. The door groaned inward on its hinges, and a stringy man with black mustache and angry black eyes walked out onto the wide stone step. The tarnished badge on his grease-spotted vest blinked in the morning sun.
“Now look here, Scott Tillman,” he said, shaking a stubby finger, “I don’t know what you’re about, but I’m giving you fair warning. This is a peaceful town. We won’t stand for no…”
Studiously Scott ignored the hot words. “You got the keys to the jail cells, Sheriff?”
“Sure I have, but I don’t see…”
Scott’s voice was cold. “Give them here.”
The sheriff jawed half a dozen more angry words before his lips began to tremble and the words died in his throat. He handed over the keys. Scott slipped the gun from the man’s slack waistband and turned him around.
“Let’s get to the cells.”
He unlocked a cell at one corner of the combination courthouse and jail and pushed the sheriff in. He slammed the door shut.
The sheriff’s voice was almost a wail. “Tillman, I’m an officer of the law! You can’t … you can’t…”
“Where’s Judge Merriwether?”
The lawman’s stubby fingers clasped tightly the iron bars. “Over at the hotel. Now, boys…”
Tillman turned away from him. “Tol, how about you taking three or four of your boys over and getting the judge? Drag him out of bed if you have to, and pull him over here in his nightshirt. Make as much show of it as it’s worth. It’ll let everybody know we’re here for business.”
Five minutes later the men were back, pushing in front of them a pudgy, red-faced little man who held his checkered pants up with one hand and his plug hat on with the other. The judge was panting with every step and hurling epithets whenever he had the breath.
“Throw him in there with the sheriff,” Scott said sharply. “Whatever we decide to do with them, they’ll both take it together.”
One of the cowboys had a rope in his hand. He shook out a loop in it. The judge stopped cursing, his red face suddenly drained white.
Outside again, Scott Tillman addressed the horseback group. “I want all the ranch owners to meet with me here at the courthouse. I want the cowboys scattered out to every part of town.
“Eight or ten men go into every saloon and watch. Don’t drink with anybody and don’t play any cards. Just stand along the wall and watch. If anybody asks you what we’re doing here, tell them we’re organizing a cowmen’s association. Tell them we’re going to handle our own law and punish our own criminals. Tell them we’re drawing up a list of all known murderers, cow thieves, crooked gamblers, and any other deadbeats we know of. And when we get the list made up, we’re going to start dealing out a little justice.”
He held his breath as he watched the cowboys spread out over the town. He half expected some scared citizen to start shooting, but the thing went off quietly.
In a few minutes the town was covered with grim cowboys who watched and waited, guns in their hands and ropes on their saddles.
Out on the riverbank two wagon cooks had started shoveling out places for cook fires. This might be a long day, and cowboys had to be fed.
The ranch owners tramped into the courtroom and sat in the rawhide chairs that were scattered over the packed-earth floor. There were a dozen of them—thirteen counting Nell Owen. There were far more stockmen than this in the high country, but they hadn’t all gotten here yet. Probably not all had even received the message. But this was enough to do the job that faced them today, Scott thought.
The weakness pulling him down, Scott sat in a chair behind a table at the front of the room and faced the group. “There’s been a lot of talk about an association in the past. Some of you liked it, some of you didn’t. But I don’t think there’s any doubt among you now that we need one. If you didn’t think so, you probably wouldn’t be here. So I guess the first thing to do is to sign up.”
Nell Owen stood up. “I’ll be the first one.”
So the meeting went, with every man in the room signing the charter roll. Then came discussion of an association name. Next came the rules under which it would operate. Each member was to be assessed according to the number of his cattle to pay for range detectives; no member was to hire a known cattle thief; no member was to hire a cowboy fired by any other member for drunkenness o
n the job, gambling on the ranch, or cruelty to horses. No member—and this hurt some—was to kill any animals other than his own for beef.
And meanwhile, throughout the mud-built little town, the tension drew taut as a guitar string.
Turk Dedecker was the first one to break. The lank gambler sat in the Paradise Bar, where he had fled for company after realizing how utterly alone he was in his mud-chinked picket shack. His fingers, usually nimble, seemed to stumble over the deck with which he played solitaire. He tried to keep his eyes from lifting to the six hard-faced cowboys who stood with their backs to the adobe wall. He thought he remembered one of the men from a poker game a good while back. As he recalled, he had won a month’s pay in an hour’s time. He usually did.
For the fifth or sixth time he attempted to smile their way and said weakly, “A little game, anybody? I’ll buy the drinks.”
A half dozen pairs of hard eyes bored at him, and no one spoke a word. Hands trembling, Dedecker poured another drink and dashed it down.
Apologetically he arose and swayed toward the door. “If you boys don’t mind, I got business…”
He was surprised they didn’t move to stop him, but he didn’t pause to ponder over it. He left the building in a heavy trot and didn’t stop running until he had reached the livery stable. Under the watchful eyes of five cowboys he flung a saddle on his horse and swung up. But as he started to ride away, one cowboy stepped forward and gripped the reins.
“We better go ask Tillman about this jaybird,” he said.
They led the quaking Dedecker to the courthouse. Tillman walked out and raked the gambler up and down with a hot glare. “Let him go,” he said finally. “But if he ever comes back, he’s liable to stretch a rope.”
Turk Dedecker spurred out of town in a high lope and didn’t slow down until he had put High Land out of sight behind him.
A hundred pairs of anxious eyes watched him go. Before long, dust began to rise above stables and barns around the town. First it was one or two men riding out furtively, saddlebags bulging with what little gear they felt worth saving, blanket rolls tied behind their saddles. Then they left in groups of three and four, riding in every direction. The cowboys noted that in almost every instance they rode out slowly enough. But as soon as they had reached the opposite bank of the river, they spurred up and disappeared over the hill in a lope.
Shortly before noon a couple of cowboys came into the courtroom and announced that the hotel was virtually empty. There wasn’t a single person left in the Paradise Bar, either, except the owner. And he had approached a couple of the cowboys with a proposition to sell the place, stock and all, cheap.
Mary Donovan hadn’t given up, but three of her girls had left town in their fancy rig, headed south.
A cook began to clang on an old iron bar hanging from one of the chuckwagons lined up along the river. The cowboys filed down to the river to eat, a handful of them at a time. In a group, the owners left the adobe courthouse and walked down to the river. Scott Tillman was with them, and Nell Owen stayed close by his side.
A weak sickness still stirring in him, Scott ate little. Most of his meal he took from the coffee pot. Sitting in the river bank sand and leaning heavily back against the wooden spokes of a wagon wheel, he watched the single rider who had left the town in a slow trot, looking back over his shoulder.
Dick Coleridge walked up and sat on his heels beside Scott. “That’s the only one in the last half hour or so. Looks to me like all of them that are going have already left.”
Scott frowned into the tin cup. “Many holdouts left?”
“Yeah. Hard to tell exactly how many, but there’s a bunch of them gathered over yonder in that big adobe, the one with the smoke coming out the chimney. They’ve been scooting over there with their guns and all the grub they could carry under their arms. Looks like they might make a stand.”
“Any others around town?”
“Some. But most of the rest don’t act very excited. Reckon they figure they’re in the clear and don’t have much to worry about. The really bad ones have left or are over in that adobe.”
Scott glanced around toward Doug McKinney. “What do you think, Doug?”
McKinney rolled a cigarette, his narrowed eyes on the holdout adobe. “I think we could take them, Scott. But it’s up to you.”
His weight still against the wagon wheel, Scott gazed at the big adobe building. He could feel the speculative, apprehensive eyes of the crowd upon him. He said finally, “It’d be expensive, Doug. Too expensive.”
He pushed himself up onto his feet. “Dick, we’d just as well pull the boys out of the other places. Put all of them around that one building, back far enough that nobody’ll get hurt, but close enough that whoever’s in there will know there’s a party outside waiting for them. We’ll just sit back and let them do the sweating. They can’t stay there forever.”
That seemed to suit most of the cowboys. They weren’t too keen about getting shot at if they didn’t have to be. Disappointment drooped the shoulders of a few, however, especially the youngest.
“I thought we came here for some action,” one of them grumbled, loud enough so Scott would hear.
In quick irritation Scott turned to him. “The man we’re really after isn’t here. He’ll get here soon enough. Then you’ll have plenty to do.”
A cordon was set up about the holdout building, a cordon bristling with guns. From inside the building came sounds of shuffling feet as the besieged men prepared for what they expected to be a storming of their stronghold. But the storm never came. Watching from outside, Scott Tillman could almost feel the tension build within the trapped men. Outside, the cow outfits waited in patience that must have been nerve-wracking to those who sweated and fumbled with their guns in the adobe.
When at last he thought he had waited long enough, Scott Tillman arose and walked out in front of the cordon. He saw the sudden fear flash into Nell Owen’s face. A dull dread gnawed at him, the realization that one of the men inside might shoot him down. But it was a chance he had to take.
“How about it?” he shouted. “Are you all about ready to come out?”
There was a moment of heavy silence, then a voice answered, “To what, a hanging party? If you want us, you know here we’re at.”
Scott sensed the ragged edge of fear in the voice. He called: “I’ll make a deal with you. Come out without your guns and we’ll let you go—provided you leave town in ten minutes. We want no killing if we don’t have to have it.”
He waited for an answer. It didn’t come. For a good three minutes he stood there in the open, alone, waiting. Then, in disappointment, he walked back to the waiting line of his men.
Relief washed over him as he sat down again. The whole time he had stood there, he was braced against the possibility of a tearing bullet. Now he relaxed, and he was surprised to find his hands trembling a little. The shoulder was aching, too.
Quietly, Nell Owen sat down beside him. She took his hand, and he noticed the unnatural whiteness of her face. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to. Her eyes said all there was to say.
Half an hour they waited. Occasionally there came a hint of the buzzing of voices in the building.
Scott’s heart leaped as he saw the heavy wooden door inch inward. “Get ready,” he called quickly, jumping to his feet. “It may be a break.”
But just one man stepped out. Anxiously he looked across at the guns that faced him. His searching eyes fell upon Scott Tillman.
“That deal you promised. Does it still hold?”
Scott nodded.
Resignedly, the man said, “You win, then. Mind you, we wouldn’t give up if we thought there was a chance. But there’s not a man here that wants to commit suicide. They’re coming out now, all of them. They won’t be armed. Mind that none of your boys gets itchy fingers.”
One by one the men filed out of the adobe building, hands over their heads. The cowboys lined them up in a double row. There were eig
hteen of them. Three punchers took a quick look inside the building.
“That’s all,” they said.
Grimly, Scott Tillman faced the surrendered men of High Land. Among the bunch were gamblers, a few known thieves, and some men who were strangers to him. But he was reasonably sure that most of their names could be found on sheriffs’ dodgers in the courthouse, if the sheriff hadn’t burned and rented out his bad memory for a reasonable price.
“The deal is that you get out of town in ten minutes. You’ll be watched, every one of you. You’ve got just enough time to catch your horses and leave. And remember this. Any man who ever comes back to this part of the country takes his life in his own hands. Now move out.”
One by one the men rode out over the hill. None of them carried their guns, and few carried any belongings except what they wore on their backs. Silent cowboys rode along with them to the hilltop and stopped there, watching them until they passed out of sight far across the next rise.
A slow grin built on Scott Tillman’s face. “Well,” he said to Nell Owen, Dong McKinney, and whoever else was listening, “that just about takes care of everybody but the sheriff and Judge Merriwether.”
He walked to the courthouse, a dozen men behind him. At the door he turned and said, “A couple of you bring your ropes in. We want to make sure our county law gets all the show it paid for.”
Judge Merriwether stood up and grabbed the bars of the cell door, blustering like a March wind. “Now see here, Tillman, I demand that you turn us loose. You’ll be dealt with to the full extent of the law for this.”
In exaggerated concern, Scott half turned and motioned toward the ropes held by two cowboys. “Under the circumstances, Judge, I’m afraid you better stay here for your own good. We’ve got some boys around here that are plenty riled. I might not be able to stop them if they were to get some fool kind of a notion.”
Merriwether sagged. His tone suddenly changed to one of pleading.
